The startup, whose clients include fire departments and rescue services, will launch a new channel for reporting alerts that will screen calls using artificial intelligence.
In 2012, civil engineer Camilo Salazar and aeronautical engineer Exequiel Gallardo developed an emergency notification system for firefighters and founded Viper.
Today they are a scale-up, with growth of over 50% in each of the last three years, and their technology has evolved into emergency management software that will be used in Ecuador, Mexico and Colombia.
The founders met at the Third Fire Company of Ñuñoa. There they developed an emergency notification system that reached volunteers’ mobile phones, making up for the lack of radios for everyone.
In 2017, the Santiago Fire Department asked them to develop a solution to manage emergencies. They created a computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system “that includes everything an emergency dispatcher needs, such as the status and location of the engines, dispatch guidelines, rules and responses,” explained Salazar.
The system runs as software as a service (SaaS), paid by license, and to date they have 106 clients, including 18 of the 24 fire departments in the Santiago Metropolitan Region and 86 dispatch centers nationwide, covering 80% of the country’s population.
“We send out notifications every 14 seconds. We have a lot of information about the emergencies being handled from Arica to Punta Arenas, because they are our clients,” he said.
Salazar added that three private clinics with rescue services, Los Andes, Alemana and Las Condes, have contracted the software.
New markets
Besides Chile, the SaaS is used in Peru and Argentina. On December 1 they signed their first client in Ecuador, a fire department with six stations and 30 vehicles in the city of Machala.
Salazar said that in 2025 they will focus on consolidating Ecuador and reaching around 40 clients in Mexico.
AI chatbot
In February, the scale-up will launch VIPER IA, a generative artificial intelligence assistant that will let people report an emergency and let fire departments verify whether it is a real emergency.
“It is a new channel for alerting emergency services, with a WhatsApp-based chatbot that will screen the calls coming into the dispatch center,” he explained.
Salazar expects to close the year with revenue up 58% compared with 2023.